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The long time attempts to revive the death penalty in the country was given a glimmer of hope in the lower house as the House of Representatives managed to get a bare majority through on the second reading of the bill. However, the said bill died a natural death in the upper house as the Senate failed to unite with a single voice for its revival.

There is no need to reiterate the long debated issues on the morality (or the lack of it) of the death penalty, human rights, the right to life, and the list goes on of the repeated arguments to trample the most brutal form of capital punishment. Nor is there a need to dwell on the emotionally charged arguments raised by human rights victims and their advocates, the main theme pointing to the ease of fighting for the rights of criminals until you, or someone close to you, become one of their victims.

What is seriously wrong with the Philippine version of the death penalty is its focus on drug related crimes, at the neglect of all other heinous crimes plaguing the nation. The drafted bill that made it past the lower house was clearly an attempt to validate the controversial extrajudicial killings which have made the current administration notoriously popular with the international community.

Laws should be based on reason and they should be made to address long term problems of the whole nation – and not just to satisfy the whims of a current administration. Laws should not single out a certain category of crimes when there are other crimes equally deserving of the same penalty.

The death penalty is not wrong per se – there is just something wrong with the Philippine version.

This was a book that chronicled the journey of activist Abby Johnson from being a volunteer for a pro-choice establishment called Planned Parenthood, to crossing over to the pro-lifers under an establishment known as Coalition for Life. The book had a spiritual aspect as Abby Johnson highlighted the events reflecting the hand of God in aid of her transformation. This article aims to focus on the more disturbing implications of her journey that pushed her from one side to the other.

At the beginning, Planned Parenthood’s pro-choice stand was simply to decrease the number of abortions through education on contraceptives and the choice of adoption. The establishment stood on the premise that, if women wanted the option to abort, it would be better to give them the means to do so safely. The establishment clung to the argument that providing safe abortions was a better alternative to condemning women from wanting an abortion and compelling them to resort to underground, unsafe, and maybe even illegal, means to get an abortion anyway. But as Planned Parenthood was a charitable institution, it relied on the funding of supporters and the government. It only charged women what they could afford to pay.

Eventually, the birth control and abortion demands outweighed the public support the establishment could elicit, and funds started to run dry. As the establishment was profiting from the few abortions performed, it geared towards a new goal of not only increasing the number of abortions to be performed, but directing women towards the option. Abby Johnson’s journey towards the Coalition for Life started when her assistance was needed in an actual abortion, and she saw first hand how a fetus was, body part by body part, sucked out of a womb.

The book leads to a realization of how complicated the pro-life versus pro-choice debate really is. Apparently, there is no easy compromise, such as the pro-choice stand is acceptable so long as abortion is not one of the choices. To make issues more complicated, the book points out that the pro-life group not only opposes abortion but also birth control. The pro-life group argues that birth control should also be banned as it prevents life from being created. The pro-life group ignores the argument that prevention is a lesser evil to destroying a life already created. Being against both abortion and birth control justifies the stand of the pro-choice group – somebody has to defend women of their right to have options when faced with an unexpected (unwanted) pregnancy.

The pro-choice versus pro-life debate will never come to an end so long as both sides fail to recognize the need to set their own boundaries. The pro-choice group needs to understand that abortion is the taking of human life, and resorting to technical questions like when does life really begin doesn’t change that fact. The pro-life group needs to understand that there is no life that needs to be destroyed if measures are taken to prevent it from being created. Imposing the need to abstain from sex or resort to natural methods of birth control is not only a limitation on human liberty, it also ignores the natural weakness of the human flesh.